Responding to Daniel Greenfield's critique of "smart" template languages ("Stupid Template Languages"). In this post we see a typical critique of Mako, that it's allowance of Python code in templates equates to an encouragement of the placement of large amounts of business logic in templates:

I often work on projects crafted by others, some who decided for arcane/brilliant/idiotic reasons to mix the kernel of their applications in template function/macros. This is only possible in Smart Template Languages! If they were using a Stupid Template Language they would have been forced put their kernel code in a Python file where it applies, not in a template that was supposed to just render HTML or XML or plain text.

What it comes down to is that Smart Template Languages designers assume that developers are smart enough to avoid making this mistake. Stupid Template Languages designers assume that developers generally lack the discipline to avoid creating horrific atrocities that because of unnecessary complexity have a bus factor of 1.

Though I'm the author of Mako, I have lots of experience with restricted templating systems, being the original creator of several, including one that became known as FreeMarker. It's my experience that non-trivial projects using such systems virtually always bring forth situations where HTML needs to be stuffed into concatenated strings inside view logic - areas where some intricate interaction of tags and data are needed, or even not so intricate interactions.

Then you have HTML tags, including the choice of tag and its CSS attributes, shoved inside your code, where no HTML person will ever see it. You only need to look as far as Django's own template documentation to see them actually encouraging it ! This to me is infinitely worse than a little bit of code in templates, and I am always struck by the Django communities' critiques of Mako's allowance of small amounts of Python in template code, as they continue to stuff HTML in their Python code as they see fit, seeing no issue at all. Mako's philosophy is that no HTML should ever be in your code anywhere, and to that end it allows your custom tag libraries to be built as templates as well.

I commonly hear the critique of Mako, as we see here, "you could write your whole application in your template ! I've seen people do it!" That argument is entirely a straw man. In contrast, my nightmare experiences with applications are those where entire HTML pages have been shoved into collections of hundreds of Perl modules or Java classes, each broken up into dozens of functions and entirely unreadable and unmaintainable. I would bet that there are some Django apps out there which do some of the same thing. Is that the way Django intended ? Absolutely not. But they can't save the world from bad code.

There's an infinite number of ways to write an application incorrectly, just because a particular library doesn't physically prevent you from doing so doesn't mean it's encouraging this behavior. Mako has no responsiblity to "assume" that developers "won't be stupid". I can assure you that no library or framework has ever achieved the feat of eliminating developer stupidity. If that is to be Django's main selling point, they can run with it.

The PHP mindset is one of the greatest evils in web development but Mako's existence is not an endorsement. We don't encourage the placement of business logic in HTML templates, nor the placement of HTML tags into business logic - something that others do.